There was a thread a while ago about performance numbers here and the two variables influencing it were, AFAICS, "-threads" and ruby version number (i.e. 1.9 being much faster).
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On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Lionel Bouton wrote:
Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists wrote:
If the packager doesn't pay attention to the compile options, it can be.
Erm.
Oups ?
I only said "can" which only refers to a possibility as:
- I didn't use Ruby on Debian/Ubuntu much (yet),
- but I just read a 2x perf increase report after recompilation and remembered other such reports last year on this list.
Can you comment on the tradeoffs these reports might have made unknowingly?You don't want to say Debian should use "-threads" and thus not allow its users to use the Tk library which requires "-threads"?
"USE=-threads" in my post refered to an option disabling pthread support in one of my Gentoo setups which has not much to do with the more common perf increases reported (most of them on Debian/Ubuntu).
BTW, technically Tk can be supported wihtout pthread if Tk isn't compiled with it itself... IIRC the problem is the same with most libs Ruby interfaces with: if it's compiled with pthread, Ruby must too.
In a binary distro, you have to make choices though and it's perfectly understandable that disabling pthread nearly everywhere in Debian just to solve the performance problems of a very small minority is not OK.
Unless all the reports of increased performance on Debian/Ubuntu are based on unknowingly disabling pthread (ldd /usr/bin/ruby anyone?) this subject isn't really interesting though.
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Tomas Pospisek
http://sourcepole.com - Linux & Open Source Solutions
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